‘Everything is judged by appearance; what is unseen counts for nothing. Never let yourself get lost in the crowd, then, or buried in oblivion. Stand out. Be conspicuous, at all cost. Make yourself a magnet of attention by appearing larger, more colourful, more mysterious than the bland and timid masses.’
So says Robert Greene in his book The 48 Laws of Power. Law 6 is Court Attention at All Costs. Well, let me prove this one to you.
I was an essential worker during the pandemic. I was working in a team who supported people with Parkinson’s, Dementia and Alzheimer’s, most patients being around 50-75 years old. When COVID hit, and lockdown was delayed because of our idiot then Prime Minister Boris Johnson, our clients were massacred. Every day people were phoning in about these desperately ill relatives. Usually, we’d see the warning at the top of the patient’s file: COVID-19 POSITIVE in bright red letters. People screamed and shouted, they’d cry, they’d demand to be put through to professionals, but we couldn’t. All we could do was email. The professionals’ job was to go through their inbox, grade the calls in levels of seriousness, and call back the most serious cases to offer support. Frequently, the relatives would miss these calls, and the dance would start again. People would go ballistic that they couldn’t just speak to the actual professionals. They’d scream, cry, demand... but rules are rules.
Eventually, in the start of 2021, Pfizer announced a vaccine. It was fully tested, fully approved, and safe. The government rolled it out and the COVID rates immediately plummeted. It was working. The country, and the world, was recovering.
Pretty much straight away, though, one person after another began to espouse their batshit anti-vaxx perspectives. Friends. Some colleagues. Celebrities. Love Islanders. Olympians. A whole load of UFC fighters.
Here’s the thing about having memory difficulties: you have to store a lot of written information to get by. Shopping lists. How to do your job. How to use the oven. How to program a VCR (historical example there). Solid note-taking is an absolute necessity. You genuinely can’t operate without it.
But then, once you start keeping notes, it becomes habitual, and it can almost take over your life. Any little titbit or instruction you learn, you’ll think, what if I need this later? Where should I store what I’m writing?
When smartphones came around (I got my first in 2010) I found the notes apps to be a game changer. Anything written could be stored, and tapping it into your keyboard would look totally normal as you’re handling your phone, like anyone else. You aren’t busting out a notebook and pen like George McFly in Back to the Future. You start by making notes like shopping lists, or instructions for using an appliance, or gym records. You write your tasks for the day, and tick them off as they’re done. You use your notes app on nights out, knowing that what you add might flesh out a blog post.
By this point you’re hooked on information. There are other types of information: things you’d rather be aware of in future. This is usually about people. You find yourself categorising the information you find, creating lists: Tories. Anti-vaxxers. Zionists. Trump supporters. The categories grow, and the lists themselves grow as people share more face to face and – more brazenly – online.
There are more reasons for people to fall out these days, and people have fewer qualms about doing so. It doesn’t half get confusing, though, and it helps now to be able to check whether you’ve categorised a person as any of the above. Just use the search bar, tap in their name, and any note they’re included in is listed. I kept these lists. As the years have gone on, I’ve steadily lost my patience with people I’ve noticed sharing the above views. I’ve unfollowed and unfriended on social media hundreds of people.
But if any of these people act up, I’ll be the first to criticise them. On X, this can get a bit of traction and it can equate to blog page views.
Back in June last year, there was a UFC fighter who found himself in intensive care after a rather nasty bout of staphylococcus aureus, a bacterial infection caused by dirt entering wounds. It’s not normally that serious but in this one case, it floored the guy. I hadn’t realised it was as serious as it was, but the name rang a bell. I won’t give him the attention now. Anyway, I checked my Omninotes app, and yes, back in 2021 he’d been spouting off a load of anti-vaxx content. Many other UFC fighters did too.
I reminded the people of Twitter about this… and I was immediately bombarded with death threats. UFC fans and MMA students usually have humongous chips on their shoulders, and hundreds quickly told me that I ‘wasn’t safe,’ and was a ‘limey piece of shit.’ It’s pretty nerve-wracking having hundreds of people baying for your blood and calling you a horrible writer, but the payoff is a huge spike in blog page views. The fighter in question is recovering as in fact training again. It all worked out in the end.
Back in February I tried this ‘Tweet for Chaos’ project that I devised, tweeting out the names of all the people in the aforementioned categories. I didn’t get the immediate backlash that I thought I would, but once this was over and we rolled into March, my page views started to climb. Are these connected? I don’t know. I recent months, my page views have gone through the roof. One one day recently I got 26 thousand hits. I’ve now passed million page views overall and I got 212 thousand in the last month, more than in any other month that I’ve been blogging.
I must have done something right. Annoying a load of anti-vaxxers probably had something to do with it. Or, maybe it’s bot traffic. I dunno.
What do you think it is?






































